Every subscriber you recognize on site gives you the opportunity to trigger journeys that drive revenue. But many brands only identify a fraction of their visitors. Here’s how to close that gap.

Picture this: A loyal customer visited your site five times this week, but your analytics only captured one of those visits.

The other four showed up as “anonymous”, creating a fragmented picture where one loyal customer looks like five different people.

Maybe they browsed on their phone during lunch, checked their prices on their laptop at home, and came back through an Instagram ad later. Each time they were just another unknown visitor, even though they’ve been a loyal subscriber for two years.

In fact, most of your subscribers likely appear as anonymous visitors every day—resulting in missed opportunities and less effective marketing campaigns. 

This isn’t a unique problem. It’s happening to nearly every brand every day.

Brands that figure out how to identify their subscribers so they can personalize the customer experience in this privacy-centric world are seeing remarkable results: a 20% increase in conversion rates and 95% higher triggered email revenue.

The identity revolution is here. And the brands winning are updating their approach to better recognize and respond to the shoppers coming to their site.

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What is identity resolution?

For the purpose of email and SMS marketing, identity resolution means the ability to recognize an opted-in subscriber when they come to your site and tie them back to an email address or phone number.

It’s about connecting the dots between a customer’s various touchpoints (across devices, browsers, email addresses, and phone numbers) to create a unified view of who they are and how they interact with your brand.

When identity resolution works, you know that the person who just abandoned a winter coat in their cart on their phone is the same person who was browsing from their laptop last night. So you can trigger the right message at the right time, personalize their experience, and avoid redundant communication.

Learn more about data and identity.

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Why traditional identity approaches need to evolve

Identity resolution used to be simpler. Traditional email service providers could rely on long-lasting cookies and stable email addresses to track customers. But in a privacy-first, multi-device reality, the service providers that have powered email marketing for the last decade aren't keeping up.

Not because they were poorly designed, but because they were built when cookies lasted forever, people were expected to keep their email addresses, and consumers did most of their shopping on one device. These older ESPs were built for a different era and haven’t evolved to handle the level of sophisticated matching necessary today.

The technical landscape has changed:

• Privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA require consent for certain types of data collection, and many people say no.
• Apple shortened first-party cookie lifespans from 30 days to 7 and turns off third-party cookies by default.
• Consumers shop across 3–5 different devices and toggle between browsers, creating a maze of disconnected touchpoints.
• 64% of people are actively protecting their privacy by using incognito mode, blocking cookies, and using multiple email addresses.

Traditional email platforms weren't built for this reality. They match visitors based only on email addresses. But shoppers often have multiple emails or may be using a device their email address hasn’t been linked to yet. Traditional approaches keep channel data in silos when customers engage across SMS, email, and push notifications. And now they’re relying on browser cookies that disappear after a week. 

The impact? Missed chances to connect with customers and earn their business. Most brands are only recognizing a portion of their returning subscribers—and missing most of the opportunities to trigger the automated journeys that make up the majority of email revenue.

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But this missed revenue creates huge opportunity

Despite protecting their privacy, 71% of those same consumers want brands to learn from their shopping habits to deliver personalized experiences.

This isn’t a contradiction. Consumers want personalized experiences, but on their terms—with transparency about data use and control over their information.

When subscribers opt into your email and SMS program, they’re explicitly saying “I want you to recognize me.” They’re giving you permission to know them—and build the kind of relationships that turn one-time buyers into lifetime customers.

When you can identify your opted-in subscribers across their full journey, you can engage them at the right times with the personalized experiences they expect—and drive exceptional results for your brand.

The brands that crack the identity code have discovered a hidden growth lever and are seeing unprecedented growth.

Take UNTUCKit, who adopted Attentive’s unified identity solution that recognizes subscribers across devices and sessions.

By improving recognition across previously fragmented channels, they’ve eliminated duplicate sends and conflicting messages. Now, every message is more relevant.

The impact? A striking 25% year-over-year increase in revenue from triggered journeys and near 60% unique open rates on email journeys.

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How to improve identity resolution

To recognize more subscribers and earn more revenue, brands need to fundamentally rethink identity.

Build identity graphs with a customer’s phone number at the center

The most resilient identity solutions anchor on customer phone numbers. Unlike email addresses that shoppers cycle through or get hidden behind proxies, phone numbers are the most stable identifiers. People keep the same number for years—even decades—and they use it across all their other devices.

With a customer’s phone number at the center, you can create an identity graph—a web that links all of a customer’s IDs to a single unified profile.

That includes their phone number, email addresses, device information, location, browser, IP address, and third-party identifiers from integrations like their loyalty ID or e-commerce platform ID.

When any one of these identifiers appears, you can connect it back to the customer even when individual signals disappear (cookies expire, email addresses change, or the consumer switches devices).

Extend your recognition window with server-side tracking

Cookie limitations don't have to mean starting from scratch every week.

When cookies are stored directly in a shopper’s browser (client-side), they’re subject to browser restrictions. Safari deletes them after seven days, and privacy modes used on any browser will block them completely.

But when identity data is processed and stored on secure servers (server-side) instead of the shopper’s browser, you can maintain recognition far beyond browser limits. These can last up to a year.

Plus, most traditional tags that are used to track consumer behavior are added to Google Tag Manager. The problem is that ad blockers block anything in Google Tag Manager, making customers anonymous again.

What to look for: A tracking solution that places a tag directly on your site, so you don’t lose traffic visibility from ad blockers or expired cookies.

To be clear: This isn’t about circumventing privacy—it’s about maintaining the relationship with subscribers who’ve explicitly opted in to receive personalized messages from you.

They want you to remember their preferences, their cart contents, and their browsing history. Server-side identity solutions make that possible by extending recognition.

Connect your customer data to unified customer profiles

With third-party cookies restricted, first-party data becomes your foundation for sustainable growth. The key is connecting this data to unified customer profiles.

When someone browses your new collection, abandons a cart, and tells you their style preferences in a quiz, these bits of information should build on each other to make your next interaction more relevant—not live in silos.

Successful brands keep building these profiles over time. Behavioral data accumulates naturally as shoppers engage with your brand. Zero-party data gets collected strategically at moments when customers can see clear value in sharing:

• An opt-in form that asks what product categories a shopper is interested in
• A quiz that gathers subscriber preferences while helping them find the right product
• A survey that delivers personalized gift recommendations ahead of BFCM while helping you understand their shopping intentions

With a modern identity solution, your data gets connected to the customer profile across all your touchpoints. Behavioral signals from browsing, message engagement, and purchases combine with preferences you gather from sign-up units, quizzes, and surveys.

With all this data in one place, SMS engagement informs email personalization, quiz data informs segmentation, and you can send the right triggered message at the right time for each subscriber. Every interaction strengthens the customer profile so you can send more relevant messages.

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How a strong identity foundation drives real results

Once you’ve set up your identity foundation to recognize your subscribers and are gathering your data into unified customer profiles, the real value emerges. Every piece of customer data becomes actionable intelligence that lets you send more relevant messages and drive more revenue.

With strong identity resolution, your triggered journeys fire when customers take action, personalization becomes truly individualized, and cross-channel messaging works in harmony.

Capture every triggered message opportunity

Triggered journeys drive the majority of email revenue, but they only work if they get sent to subscribers. And they only get sent to subscribers when you can identify who’s on your site.

When you improve identity resolution, the impact on triggered journeys is immediate and dramatic. Supergoop! saw a 49% year-over-year increase in email journey deliveries simply from better subscriber recognition. Overall, their email and SMS program benefited from 67% more revenue per send from top-performing journeys.

They weren't pouring time into making complex flows, optimizing send times, or A/B testing their messages to perfection. They were just recognizing more of the subscribers who were already shopping on their site and sending messages that match their customers' behavior.

More recognition means more triggered messages get sent. More triggered messages mean more revenue.

But send volume is just the beginning. Once you’re capturing these opportunities, you can make each message work harder through advanced personalization.

Make every message more relevant

In addition to sending more triggered messages, a strong identity foundation helps you craft messages that truly resonate.

Because you’re identifying subscribers more consistently, you can tie their behavior back to their customer profile, rather than that behavior staying anonymous. These detailed profiles give AI engines the context they need to personalize messages accurately at scale.

With this unified customer view, AI-powered personalization engines can:

• Personalize entire journey flows
• Predict optimal send times for each customer
• Identify high-intent audiences for campaigns

The result: Every message becomes more relevant, driving measurably higher revenue for your brand.

Coordinate messages across channels more effectively

Aligning your email and SMS campaigns without unified customer profiles makes it easy for wires to get crossed. You might send an abandoned cart follow-up by text when that subscriber has already converted by email. Or continue emailing promotions to someone who only engages with your texts.

Not ideal for your ROI.

When you have complete customer profiles that connect all your customer data, you have a clearer picture of engagement and can send messages that match a shopper’s interactions with your brand.

That subscriber who never opens emails? They’re highly active via SMS, so send them more texts. The customer who browses extensively after receiving an email, but buys via text? You know which channel gets them interested and how to get them to purchase.

Being able to make smarter decisions about when and where to send messages prevents you from sending too many messages saving money while preserving the customer relationship.

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Your identity advantage starts now

When brands need to meet consumers’ desire for personalization while respecting privacy, the brands that can do both will lead the way forward. They'll recognize more visitors, trigger more journeys, orchestrate more intelligently, and discover untapped revenue.

By adopting an identity infrastructure designed for a privacy-centric world and consumers’ complex shopping journeys, you open up opportunities to:

• Send journeys based on a full picture of engagement
• Suppress repetitive messages based on customer actions
• Build complete profiles that enable truly personalized marketing

When looking for solutions, prioritize platforms built for modern privacy realities and shopping behavior.

Attentive’s identity infrastructure was built for the modern technical landscape from day one. As a result, we recognize more returning visitors compared to traditional ESPs—leading to 20% higher conversion rates and 95% more triggered email revenue.

Ready to recognize more visitors and grow your revenue? Learn more about Attentive Signal and book a demo.